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Enders Analysis provides a subscription research service covering the media, entertainment, mobile and fixed telecommunications industries in Europe, with a special focus on new technologies and media.

Our research is independent and evidence-based, covering all sides of the market: consumers, leading companies, industry trends, forecasts and public policy & regulation. A complete list of our research can be found here.

 

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Service revenue growth dropped off by 2.7ppts this quarter, and into negative territory, as operators in all markets suffered weaker growth
 

Operators in France and the UK implemented price increases this quarter but re-contracting absorbed any positive revenue impact. In Italy, regulatory intervention thwarted operator plans to raise prices
 

Increasing competitive intensity in France and Germany comes at a time when operators can ill-afford ARPU dilution and high churn
 

"This gives the impression that DAZN is adjusting a little to the price expected by the French market," reacts analyst François Godard, from the Enders Analysis firm. This may only be the beginning. "If DAZN launches a promotion like this at the beginning of September, we can expect there to be others. To me, it looks like a price drop," considers the expert. In neighboring countries, such as Germany and Italy, DAZN applies a "relatively high" pricing strategy, he recalls, but "the story is not the same." In Italy, for example, the annual subscription costs 359 euros per year, or 29.92 euros per month. But DAZN, which has been broadcasting all Serie A matches there since 2022, was launched in 2018 with lower prices, which have increased as the offer has expanded.
Enders Analysis, a company regarded as the gold standard for media research, put it in a recent report: “There is still a widespread misconception that sports viewing has declined at the same pace as the rest of broadcast TV due to increased competition, the high price of pay TV and the supposed short attention spans of the social media generation. In fact, sports viewing has been the most resilient component of broadcast TV.” As Enders points out, it’s not just the big-ticket items on network TV which are flying either. In fact, young viewers now consume nearly half of their sports through Sky, “dwarfing the combined efforts of the BBC and ITV, which refutes the widely held view that young people don’t watch sport behind a paywall”, while TNT Sports has also seen its audience share rise. That is noteworthy, given price rises and piracy concerns due to firesticks. And there is a final surprise in the Enders report.
Alice Enders, at Enders Analysis, said the fact that English is such a global language will always keep the UK on the front foot. She added: ‘There is also a pool of educated young people who have all the right skillsets.’ But Enders emphasised that the data is more complicated than it first appears as the Office for National Statistics does not provide a detailed breakdown. As well as direct ad sales, it includes conferences and events, making it more difficult to gauge the impact of specific parts of the industry.
Douglas McCabe, the chief executive at Enders Analysis, points to the success enjoyed by the owner of the Daily Mail’s investment in Zoopla, and the Guardian’s former ownership of AutoTrader. “It is the type of diversification that Rupert has always been interested in,” said McCabe “He tried to set up the first pan-newspaper owner online classified service. The classified market in general is one newspaper owners feel comfortable with; there is a heritage and history to this, and businesses here such as Daily Mail & General Trust and the Guardian have done well out of it. Lachlan sniffs an opportunity here.”
Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis, said: “It has been a tough few years for the company with escalating competitive pressure from alt nets in particular and an operationally complex move to full-fibre. “There are, however, reasons to believe that the threat from the alt nets will wane, and the most challenging fibre complexities will soon be behind them.”

Women’s sport press news coverage during the 2024 Paris Olympics has softened after three years of record-breaking highs, though it remains up 3.8x on 2016 levels

Publications vary in their representation, with populars increasing article numbers faster, though qualities continue to devote more space to women. Success is a key generator of ‘newsworthy’ content

Coverage of women’s sport, despite falling article numbers, is larger and more prominent than before, and the threshold for inclusion continues to fall—signalling wider normalisation of women in sports pages
 

The likes of Gardeners’ World, DIY programmes and films about urgent domestic issues and obscure parts of the country would be threatened if the broadcaster were forced to implement a Netflix-style paywall for the next charter period from 2027, according to Enders Analysis. It said: “A shift to a subscription-funded BBC would undermine a crucial tenet of its public service mission by narrowing access. This would severely reduce the impact of the BBC’s public service content, which has wide reach across society.

A subscription funding model would be antithetical to the BBC’s public service mission, necessarily ending universality of access and undermining its breadth of content. 

Options like separating out “public service” content from other programming would result in a decline in news consumption, while the subscription model would risk sustainability and encourage short-term thinking. 

Further, there are technical roadblocks to executing this model, meaning that it is not feasible until long after the end of the current Charter in 2027.